#3517 Sparks - Hello Young Lovers

3.5/5 for my money, I'll take this over Lil' Beethoven for my late-era Sparks repetition-fest. More quietly strange, without the sharp edges of cringey bitterness. From the unpredictably direct opener to the closing howl against obscurity, everything swoops in placing, seemingly content to amuse itself. 20 albums deep, this might just be Sparks finally out to pasture, humming to themselves about what might have been

#3513 Sparks - Lil' Beethoven

3/5 regarded as Sparks' big modern masterpiece, but nah.

Repetition's the name of the game, again, this time over lots of strings. It's an inventive stab at not-rock. The opener's brazenly minimal as they come, and there's some knotty little jokes woven into the repetition; Carnegie Hall shows what it tells, and Your Call's Very Important to Us is a fun Zooropian piece of lived microdystopia.

But Sparks' streak of bitterness crosses a line into embarrassing this time out, ranting about modern bands and suburban homeboys, whining endlessly about women who only care about money -- it's gross, and undercuts the detached cool the rest of the album worked so hard to build

#3512 Sparks - Balls

3/5 it's easy enough to assign intentions to Sparks' previous albums of the era, but this is a weird one. Leaning right into big dumb British electronica a half decade too late, it's not quite a pop grasp, but its hard to imagine anyone being especially proud of it. Not awful to listen to exactly, but hollow and forgettable

#3511 Sparks - Plagiarism

3/5

This is bullshit! you can hear the Maels shout, finally getting a critical crumb or two, after decades of intermittent brilliance

So sure make those great old songs again, with strings, electronics, and faith no more (?) The album kicks off with, what else, a remake of Pulling Rabbits Out of A Hat, their ode to empty excellence, now swarthed in every flourish a symphony can afford. This Town Ain't Big enough, in particular, benefits from all that excess, pumping an overblown song past bursting into delightfully ridiculous.

But nobody needs hard-driving dance remixes or tacky guitar-driven versions of the rest, sounding cheap, like copyright-dodging karaoke versions. Unnecessary, if strangely understandable

#3508 Sparks - Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins

4.5/5 Sparks go away for 6 years and come back with a revelation. A wonderfully bizarre bent-pop record with songs riffing on Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Gone with the Wind, Liberace, and Chinese filmmaker Tsui Hark. You know, 90's stuff.

From its Confidential magazine cover and blaring sensationalism, its an album out of time, a frantic thrashing against celebrity, peaking with the flayed I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car. From ruminations on the ennui of owning the BBC, to trancy micro-experiments - it's a complete 180 from their pop-grasping lows.

But the signature song is The Ghost of Liberace, a pop fairy tale of what remains of fame, reflected in the story of a man once scourged by Confidential itself. It's hard not to see it as autobiographical. Elegiac and hopeful that one will be remembered fondly, it's Sparks accepting that it's better to burn out bright on your own terms. If this had been their last album, it would have been strangely perfect, but the story's got a couple twists yet

#3507 Sparks - Interior Design

2.5/5 the dying gasp of pop-desperate-era Sparks. Limp new-wave bopping and uncomfortably uncool ballads, it doesn't seem like their hearts were even into selling out anymore. The cover's all wrong too. An album made by nobody, mislabeled and misfiled

#3504 Sparks - Music that You Can Dance To

2.5/5

Sparks goes all the way down the rabbithole, making music so pop it almost goes around the horn and is _about pop music. Almost!

Layered with the tackiest possible synths, these are just songs called Music You Can Dance To, Armies of the Night, and Let's Get Funky, which more or less do what they say on the tin. Fingertips sounds like a prescient dancepunk song without the cool:

Everybody say yeah! Everybody have a good time! Just one more time! Clap your hands just a little bit louder!

Again, it _almost works, you can _almost admire it, but it never escapes the orbit of its brazen intentions. Plus the songs just aren't very good to listen to

#3503 Sparks - Pulling Rabbits out of a Hat

2.5/5

if you want to understand the sixteen year, six-album fistfight with the world that this album kicked off, look no further than the title track.

You can almost picture the Maels having a beer with friends one night when, in a moment of wellmeaning drunken candor, someone drawls

"you guys are such talented songwriters! how come you've never had
you know
a hit?"

detached, one replies

"we could have, could have had dozens. If that was that's what we were going for"

And then Ron and Russel were challenged to prove it.

--

Of course, its not that Sparks were ever _aggressively disinterested in having a hit. But they'd never stooped to making something in the basest terms of what was popular. And in the mid-80's, stooping was a pretty all or nothing proposition.

And so with much swagger does this album kick off, announcing that, for my next trick, I will make pop music, and people will love it. And this is the easiest, most basic trick there is, the pulling a rabbit out of a hat of songwriting. And I have performed so much grander tricks: made a pauper a king, raised the titanic, made legitimately great music for a decade.

And even the choice of phrasing: I am pulling rabbits, one after another, out of this hat. Not one rabbit. Not out of multiple hats. I am _churning _these _hits _out until the room looks like the cover of fucking Hello Young Lovers.

But then the crux of the matter in the song's whelp of a chorus:

_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_pulling rabbits out of a hat

_all I get is polite applause!
_applause, applause, applause, applause, applause 

It is as fine a run of 11 words as you'll find in music, and 6 of them are the same one. A disdain for the payoff of this trick, that the applause is polite, that the appreciation is critical, but halfhearted, and certainly without commercial payoff. For all its confidence, the song betrays an anticipation that this all will fail. Polite applause, who needs it. But Russell continues!

Applause! he repeats again and again, desperate and ecstatic and failing, as if flogging one team of horses and being flogged by another.

is that all I get? god yes the applause! more, more you fallow fools!

it is cheap and hollow and its all that I want and there will never be enough.

a wracked, complicated song, sneering at the audience and desperate for its affection, wrenching itself ouroboran into operatic glam self-loathing. An overlooked art-pop gem.

--

Of course, Sparks was not successful. The album is packed cheap, bouncing pop songs, each packed with budget synths and endless repetition of the name of the song. There's flashes of wry humor, but nothing that matches the apparently-worthy-of-400-words opener, and certainly nothing unscathed by its brazen attempt to hit a single by scattershot.

It's like the Maels made this album on a bet, but they weren't really sure they wanted to win it.

--

Stick with us for Sparks Week 2 - The Repetition Era, where we'll see a descent into nothingness, a surprising resurgence, a swing at cosmic justice, and the most overrated ending since The Usual Suspects!

#3035 Sparks - In Outer Space

Sparks zag again, back into disco-flecked synthpop, retreating from pop culture into their most intimate album in years. A portrait of insecurity, discomfort with a world built on slickness and grace, bristling at the 80's just as it's getting started. Lucky Me, Lucky You's an understated bit of bittersweetness. I can't shake Boys and Girls in America - that trying, trying.

Musically, Outer Space straddles Heaven and Terminal well enough, but its the return of that restless grasping that carries it 4/5

#3034 Sparks - Angst in My Pants

Sparks find their footing yet again. Russell's toned down the vocal gymnastics, finding a rich, searching sound - the title track and Sherlock Holmes are as soulful as anything Sparks've done. Return-to-form adventurousness and refinements of their latest sounds abound: I Predict would have been perfectly at home as the best song on Big Beat or Whomp. And Moustache is just good Mint Chicks fun.

Some of the pop culture bits fall flat, but mostly Angst's inscrutably great. Shades of Blur at their best. Another baffling data point on the most untrackable career in rock 4/5

#3033 Sparks - Whomp that Sucker

After 9 albums of exploration, Sparks start to spin their wheels, settling into a vaguely campy, arch brand of poppy new-wave. The songs are hook-light and idea-light and borderline annoying, the repetition losing its magic. Outdone in every way by Terminal Jive and Angst 2.5/5

#3023 Sparks - Terminal Jive

After their music-hall//stripped-down-rock//disco albums comes Sparks' new wave album. There might not be a band in the history of rock better able to adapt to the styles of the now (the Stones are an underrated also-ran in this category). And as always (Big Beat excepted) they bring a generous dollop of their own style, blending #1iH's disco with their own slinky sensibilities to end up with something synthy and insistent, something between Blondie, U2, ELO - one band I like and two bands I "actually-like" like. Good, lightly strange fun 3.5/5

#3022 Sparks - No. 1 in Heaven

I can't say more sincerely how much I respect Sparks for so thoroughly selling out. Or, more generously, adopting and adapting to the latest technology. Always genre shapeshifters, always chasing the center of the music soul-body, why not get in bed with the hottest dude in the hottest style (Giorgio) and start ruttin.

On a shrinking path, tightening up, cleaning up, Sparks seemed doomed as the 70s wound down.

But Russel gets back in touch with his most falsetto-drenched lothario-struttin self, backed by relentless, writhing pulses. No 1 in Heaven's at once so true to their early bravado and riding still-cresting wave of synths and driving beats. It's them and not-them in blinding fashion, in a way that splinters what the band is. Lesser bands woulda rode their own rut to nowhere, but here's this pulsing, strange piece of new 4/5

#3021 Sparks - Introducing

Undeniably part of the post-magic 2nd-era genre-driven (Beach-Boys-style pop) Sparks. But wildly better than it gets credit for (way better than Big Beat, say), full of classic melodies, arch asides, joyous convergences. Forever Young's a classic, staking a claim to the basic melody way before the better-known song of the same name, and Occupation's got a message various waves of post-punk are still catching up to. Also, I'm pretty sure Big Surprise is about transexual optimism. I honestly can't tell if these guys are meathead shitheads or pre-Queen queer geniuses or both 4/5

#3018 Sparks - Big Beat

Sparks' seventies low point - worse than the underrated Introducing. Soulless, somehow over- and under-produced, a thin, taut swing at stripped down rock that scuffs and polished when it should have left alone. Is there an undercurrent of closeted thrashing running through this? If so, should've committed; if not it's just humorlessly gross about women 2.5/5

#3017 Sparks - Indescrete

The sunset of classic first-era Sparks arc - our protagonist a shadow now. A bridge to the genre-driven second-era Sparks, dropping backwards into full music hall -- so many horns and strings and quirky flourishes.

Propaganda was peak repetition, riding that hypnosis right on the knife's edge of thrilling. There's flashes of that magic here, the relentless chug of Happy Hunting Ground, the drunken swoon of How Are You Getting Home. But it falters, our hero shuddering on loose legs. Most of the songs are thin, goofy jokes boring after the first chorus. A clumsy stumble. Telling that the cover shows the band crashing to earth 3/5

#3012 Sparks - Propaganda

Storming forward, full of power and retreat, at least as good as the much-acclaimed Kimono. That repetition. Finding some anthem and riding it, it's as bracing as any of Sparks' previous swerves. Utterly confident. From the martial stomp of Reinforcements, to the frantic searching of At Home/Work/Play, to the gallop of Achoo.

--

So confident our protagonist retreats from the public eye, now a reclusive magistrate, no worlds left to conquer, beholden to his own rules alone, and quite indulging, sashaying around his glass-walled home overlooking the ocean.

--

And we can't escape the sense of a concept, of a kidnapping, of control, of conflicting feelings, Stockholm and its inverse. What more perversely glamorous than capturing something glamorous and holding it in your hands?

--

And so nonsense spills anew. There's something in Sparks early output that reaches into your lizard brain and awakens your imagination, that brings you to spin tales, that reminds you that life can be imaginary and beautiful and perverse and what you make it, that your every thought spins a consequence. Inspiring, in all ways good and ill. Absolutely one of the lost bands in all of rock 4.5/5

#3011 Sparks - Kimono My House

This one took me a few. But jesus the swagger. What a lost gem. The pinnacle of mania. Russell's swinging from the chandeliers, and the rest of the band gallops alongside This Town.., Here In Heaven, Equator -- the euphoria. You get this marriage of reckless energy and tight melody startlingly seldom in life, hold on tight to it when you find it. Around now I'm ready to call Sparks the most underappreciated band of the 70s. Where are these songs on classic rock radio? Too strange I suppose. The first four songs make Bowie and Bolan look like stiffs. Worth noting also are the two cd bonus tracks (Barbecutie, Lost and Found), two of the albums biggest earworms, predicting Propaganda. Delights both.

--

Our cult comes up from the underground and their leader storms the staterooms and ballrooms. King of the world, bedding every woman imaginable. Maybe not just women ---- all lost in a hedonistic haze. Our hero hasn't changed, as idealistic as ever, the world rising up to meet his steady standard of euphoric bliss 4.5/5

#3010 Sparks - A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing

A transitional spasm, as Sparks became a band proper, shaking off Rundgrens's minimalism, before they arrived at their fully formed world-conquering sound.

Uneven, but featuring some strutting, blinding glam highlights. The stomp of Beaver O'Lindy's irresistable, and the momentum of Underground/The Louvre's _fucking ____exciting. Jesus. Take that as a single 8 minute song and its one of the best of the 70s.

--

The image of this album is of our skulking dream from S/T, belting his last note from the empty stage, as the pale nobodys emerge from the shadows, drawn by the swaying confidence. France, catacombs, secrecy, redemption, a throwing off of the cloak - this is cult classic music, lurking music of the individual finding its foothold with the few. And you all know what happens after that. Stay tuned 4/5

#2999 Sparks - Sparks

Sparks rules, lots of ink on them incoming in the next couple weeks, I'm sure.

Despite the 5 toughs on the cover, Sparks' debut feels conjured from the imagination, a personal, private grasp at something beautiful. Their glammy, strutting sound's all there from the jump, Russell's manic vocals sliding all around the room. But Todd Rungren's production is so patient and airy; so big and yet so small. The whole album has music hall scope; broad, beautiful gestures echoing off faraway ceilings. But it's a dream of the stage, a rigger stealing a song after hours, an imagined audience held rapt by songs about the opera and the ballet 4/5